Le 3000 Laurier — Québec City, Quebec

Québec City’s largest current development started June 2, and the hardest part isn’t the 28 storeys — it’s excavating five levels of parking directly beside a live tramway worksite.

Project Scope

Le 3000 Laurier puts 896 rental units on the top 25 floors above a three-level, 120,000-square-foot podium of commercial and medical space. Total project value is C$400 million, of which C$250 million is construction. Groupe Medway is developer and owner, CCM2 Architecture designed it, L2C Experts-Conseils handled structure, and Tisseur Inc. is the general contractor.

Forty percent of the units are below market — under C$1,500 a month, with some studios below C$1,000. “On ne veut pas que la capacité de payer des gens soit un frein à venir s’installer ici,” said Yan Boudreau, Medway’s president and founder. Amenities include a café, gym and pool. The anchor commercial tenant is the GMF-U Laurier teaching family medicine clinic, which gets roughly 30% more floor area than its current space.

The engineering is more interesting than the program. The lateral system uses three reinforced concrete cores formed by coupled shearwalls, sized for stiffness through each construction phase rather than just the finished condition. Wind tunnel testing quantified wind pressures, occupant comfort and foundation optimization. The ground floor slab was thickened to act as a large diaphragm transferring wind and seismic forces from the cores into the rest of the foundation. Working with CCM2, L2C held thin floor slabs without drop panels and ran columns continuously from roof to foundation so loads flow straight down.

Why It Matters

The site sits on the TramCité corridor — a 19-kilometre, 29-station tramway running along Laurier Boulevard — near the Sainte-Foy interchange hub. Building 896 units at a station is exactly the density transit investment is supposed to produce, and it rarely arrives this fast.

Jean-Philippe Carrier, principal partner at L2C, said the retaining-wall stabilization next to the active tramway excavation goes “beyond what is typically required.”

Phasing runs parking and podium through late 2027, the first 300 units in summer 2028, 300 more a year later, and the final 300 in 2029. Boudreau: “It is our biggest project and I think the biggest project in Quebec City now.”

Project Team & Details